Thoroughly enjoyable, witty and exciting historical murder mystery set on the Scottish border in the 17th century.

Guns guns guns, some of which explode some of which don't, a trip to the court of the king of Scotland and a number of plots and assorted feuds and venomous enemies for Robert Carey to tangle with, with the help of Sergeant Dodd and Young Hutchins.

The best part of having read this is that you;ve finally read the sort of collection of stories by the sort of author who and which appear in stories about people who have read collections of mysterious stories by mysterious authors which exert a strange fascination on the mind and the formation of cult-like devotees, and to which one can make references, as to the northern border town and the red tower and the digestive ailments which afflict his characters and the spiralling deeper and deepr into an obsessive worldview of nightmarish nihilism which devours his characters and the author himself and the readers until they all become consumed by the certainty that they are animated by a vast darkness that has annihilated all nonsense such as mind or spirit and left only an activated organism perpetuating itself. So, there's that.

I missed two books in this series but they're hard to get hold of so feck it i felt like an adventure with Corbett and Co. Anyway, you turn your back for ten seconds and everyone's trapped in a remote Welsh village, drugged and terrorised by an evil criminal genius, and your only hope is to steal.a book from a gang of homicidal maniac evil criminal geniuses by disguising yourself as a pair of Bavarian assassins and entering into an evil auction with your partner a smooth and ruthless hitman. This you now do. let their be murder and mayhem.

Murder most adorable as Wells and Wong return to Deepdean and their fellow Detective Society members. Sure enough at a gala weekend to celebrate the school's founding, someone gets murdered. Or did they? No body can be found, but something definitely happened, and soon the existence of their beloved school is at risk. Even the brilliant detective duo will find it difficult to untangle the fiendish crime.

Bringing the Gormenghast-crossed-with-The -Village-Green-Preservation-Society fantasy trilogy to a thunderous close, with Wynter ascendant and his enemies scattered and confused. But there are a few last secrets lurking here and there, including a potent one in the villain's very brain. Rotherwierd has established its own very distinctive style and milieu - albeit passingly evocative of an endless library of classic British fantasy - and if you enjoyed the first two, this is certainly a welcome final visit.

Slough House - where screw up secret agents go to get tormented into quitting, but every now and then stuff happens, like two of them being seconded to provide security for a meeting with a Russian oligarch and Jackson Lamb taking an interest in the death of an old Berlin hand on a bus. Jackson follows a trail that leads to some nasty old secrets and secret service myths coming oddly and dangerously to life. Things twist and turn from the idylic british countryside to the top of a glittering London tower, and not all the Slow Horses are coming home.

A missionary goes to Arcadia to convert the fae to the Protestant religion. His sister follows, taking residence in a brooding gothic pile while waiting for her brother to return. She finds herself perturbed by the question of what happened to her brother's predecessor and his fascination with the language of Enochian, supposedly the language of the angels. Prickly theological questions arise over the nature of the fae, whther they have souls, whther they can be saved. Her brother returns and following close behind is the court of Queen Mab who intends to take her entertainment from her pet missionary and his sister.

I have many complicated feelings about the premise of this highly original and imaginative fantasy novel, mostly around the idea of religiously converting beings of myth and legend, but they are difficult to express at the moment. Suffice it to say that this is a singular piece of work by a powerful new voice.

A more perfect, luminous book you could not hope to find or enjoy. A modern fairy tale that sprinkles its casual modernity with wit and restraint, yet which is so deeply and madly in love with fairy tales that it never thinks to undermine or mock them, but celebrates them with a language that combines beautiful, straightforward simplicity with heartfelt, lyrical imagery.

I first read this is my first year of secondary school, when the film came out, which I never saw, and the trailer was on the television, featuring a brief glimpse of a knight fighting a fire-breathing dragon. Now, I was well familiar with the idea of knights fighting fire-breathing dragons, but the fact was you rarely encountered them in books and films and stories, and so I was quite keen to see this film which had a knight fighting a fire-breathing dragon as what was surely a major and crucial part of the plot. As it happened, I never saw the film, but someone gave me a book. I read it, and it was great, but my enjoyment was tempered by the absence of a knight fighting fire-breathing dragons, which loomed large in my consciousness, but not on the page. Until near the end, when Prince Lir casually mentions his efforts to woo the transformed unicorn by killing up to five dragons. Just mentions it, and that's it.

It'd be wrong to say I felt cheated, but my enjoyment of the book was thwarted by my own erroneous expectations, as happens from time to time. I am delighted now to correct that experience, and discover that this books is simply incredible. You can tell people like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, to name but two, almost certainly read and loved this book, and if you have any feeling for fantasy, or for fiction, or for good writing, you will too.

(What? This is not evocative of Pet Semetary at all!)

A tough read, one of those reads that is tough precisely because it does the things it sets out to do and does them well. A beautiful near future apocalyptic tale of death and loss and grief in the face of rising natural and social catastrophe, the cruelest thing this does, beyond making characters you come to love go through hell, is offer out a richly imagined tendril of hope through transformation. Damn you, Helen Marsall. That hurts. Well done.